Free Iran Rally & the Role of the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK)

By Jubin Katiraie

A major gathering is being held at the Villepinte Exhibition Center outside of Paris, France. The gathering is focused on Iran policy and at the center of the case is the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran. The People’s Mojahedin is also known by its Persian name, Mojahedin-e Khalq or MEK and it is the main constituent group in the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the leading coalition advocating for the cause of regime change driven by the Iranian people and their expatriate allies.

The Free Iran rally has been growing every year. The 2017 gathering is expected to keep pace with the previous few years, with upwards of 100,000 supporters of the MEK traveling to France from throughout the world. Naturally, the participants will mostly represent Iranian expatriate communities, but each year’s event also draws hundreds of politicians and foreign policy experts who recognize the global value of the MEK and the 10-point plan that NCRI President Maryam Rajavi has laid out for the future of Iran.

A Long Conflict between the Clerical Regime and the MEK

The origins of the MEK date back to before the 1979 Iranian Revolution., the MEK helped to overthrow the dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi, but it quickly became a bitter enemy of the emerging the religious fascism under the pretext of Islamic Republic. To this day, the MEK and NCRI describe Ruhollah Khomenei and his associates as having co-opted a popular revolution in order to empower themselves while imposing a fundamentalist view of Islam onto the people of Iran.

Under the Islamic Republic, the MEK was quickly marginalized and affiliation with it was criminalized. Much of the organization’s leadership went to neighboring Iraq and built an exile community called Camp Ashraf, from which the MEK organized activities aimed at ousting the clerical regime and bringing the Iranian Revolution back in line with its pro-democratic origins. But the persistence of these efforts also prompted the struggling regime to crack down with extreme violence on the MEK and other opponents of theocratic rule.

The crackdowns culminated in the massacre of political prisoners in the summer of 1988, as the Iran-Iraq War was coming to a close. Thousands of political prisoners were held in Iranian jails at that time, many of them having already served out their assigned prison sentences. And with the MEK already serving as the main voice of opposition to the regime at that time, its members and supporters naturally made up the vast majority of the population of such prisoners.